Making A Mark: Artworks From The Studio Prints Collection at Victoria Gallery and Museum

When Dorothea Wight left the Slade in 1968, she found a basement in Camden for two pounds a week, took out a bank loan for a press, and started printing. That was the beginning of Studio Prints – and over the next four decades, it became one of the most important artists’ printmaking workshops in Britain.

The studio’s reputation was built on collaboration. Wight’s guiding principle from the start was that the relationship between artist and printer had to be close, attentive and genuinely creative. When Marc Balakjian joined in 1974 – brought in, as the studio described it, as a printing “problem solver” – he and Wight developed that into something more sustained. The pair married three years later and ran Studio Prints together until it closed in 2011, after Lucian Freud, who had worked exclusively with Balakjian since the mid-1980s, died. Balakjian spoke of how important it was for the printer to “get into the mind of the artist.” With Freud, Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Celia Paul all among the artists who came through the studio in those years and stayed, something clearly worked.

Making a Mark brings 45 prints from that story to the Victoria Gallery & Museum – the first time they’ve been on public display since the University of Liverpool was gifted the collection in 2019. Alongside prints produced for Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Paul and Stephen Conroy, the exhibition includes mezzotints made by Wight and Balakjian themselves, which is a quietly important decision: it places the printers inside the story as artists in their own right, not just its enablers.

The show opens just weeks after the Courtauld Gallery launched its own Studio Prints display in London – a coincidence that suggests the moment is right for this story to reach a wider audience. In Liverpool, it gets a generous run: free to visit, and on until the end of January.